From Paris Hilton to John Edwards: celebrity sex tapes are the signature art form of our age.

AuthorBeato, Greg
PositionColumn

IN RECENT YEARS, the porn industry has gotten screwed harder than a beleaguered Marquis de Sade heroine, first by rampant piracy, then by a vicious recession. Now that thousands of former customers believe that money shots should be as free as Lady Gage singles and New York Times editorials, the industry's revenues are dropping, production is declining, and thousands of talented but underutilized adult video performers are fantasizing about a stimulus package of their own. But even if lesbian MILF bondage is no longer the foolproof cash cow it once was, there's still one subspecies of porn that can reliably open our wallets.

How strong is the allure of the celebrity sex tape? Just ask John Edwards. Blessed with the raw animal magnetism of a well-groomed Maltese, the one-time Democratic presidential candidate is certainly not the first person you'd think of if you were asked to name America's most bankable porn star. But according to Andrew Young, the former Edwards aide who temporarily possessed a copy of a 15-minute sex tape his boss made with his personal videographer Rielle Hunter, at least one entrepreneur offered Young "gigantic amounts of money" for the unlikely artifact.

Combining technology, exhibitionism, populism, fame, a do-it-yourself ethos, and the possibility of a quick buck, the celebrity sex tape celebrates everything we celebrate; it's the signature art form of the age. It also solves porn's greatest challenge in an age of visual ubiquity: How to retain an aura of illicitness.

Throughout the 20th century, even as photographs, films, and video proliferated, various constraints limited the amount of imagery available to us. In the world of old media, devoting 70 editorial pages to, say, celebrity nose-picking photos, was an extravagance not even The National Enquirer could afford. Compiling gruesome galleries of headless motorists, armless torture victims, and kittens becoming lunch was not considered a particularly noble way to inform the public or attract department store advertisers. Economics and taste kept us optically innocent.

But visual information wants to be free, too. In the late 1990s, as the Web started shifting from a primarily text-based medium to a far more image-heavy one, sites like Rotten.com and StileProject.com pushed the limits of the IMG tag. Suddenly, truly exotic examples of the forbidden were as accessible as Miss July centerfolds. And porn, which for decades had functioned as our primary...

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